‘EVERYBODY KNEW THE RUSSIAN EMPRESSES HAD LOVERS’

BY VICKY DEARDEN/HOTFEATURES

Dame Helen Mirren returns to TV in the epic new drama Catherine the Great. Here she talks about her new role, her Russian roots, her incredible career spanning five decades, her international breakthrough with Prime Suspect, and more… British actress Helen Mirren first came to international recognition via the small screen, thanks to her role as DCI Jane Tennison in the hugely popular series Prime Suspect. On the big screen, she has appeared in over 60 films and won an Oscar in 2007 for her portrayal as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen. (She also won four Emmys, including one in 2006 for TV mini-series Elizabeth I.) She returns to royalty with Catherine the Great, playing the tumultuous monarch and politician who ruled the Russian empire and transformed its place in the world in the 18th century. The four-part historical drama follows the end of Catherine’s reign and her affair with Russian military leader Grigory Potemkin, which shaped the future of Russian politics.

Helen Mirren attends the Los Angeles premiere of the new HBO limited series Catherine the Great at the Hammer Museum on October 17, 2019 in Los Angeles, California.

MANY PEOPLE DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT CATHERINE THE GREAT, EXCEPT THAT SHE HAD A LOT OF SEX?

HELEN MIRREN: That is a complete calumny thrown at her by history, I think, because history really doesn’t like successful, powerful women. I hope we are going to re-instate her reputation as the incredible leader that she was. I’m not saying she didn’t have her faults. She made mistakes and finished up quite tyrannical, but she was originally a reformer of this vast, vast country.

SHE WASN’T RUSSIAN BY BIRTH, OR WAS SHE?

HM: She was German. But she came to Russia at the age of 15 and married, I think, at 16 and learnt Russian. [She was a] prodigious writer. She’d get up at five ‘o’clock every morning and write for two or three hours. Her letters [are] funny, interested, curious. [She] spoke five or six languages – she was extraordinary. She was definitely on a par with Elizabeth I in terms of intellect.

HOW DIFFERENT WAS IT PLAYING A RUSSIAN QUEEN HAVING PLAYED BRITISH QUEENS?

HM: Well, of course Elizabeth I was much earlier, but Catherine’s world was just so different. And before Catherine was Elizabeth, her mother-inlaw, and before Elizabeth was Catherine I – and they all had a series of lovers. The whole attitude to sex was so different. The Russian Empresses behaved like men, like Louis XIV. They had lovers and everybody knew they had lovers. It was an accepted part of their culture – that’s so not British [laughs].

SHE DIDN’T HAVE TO DO THE WHOLE VIRGIN QUEEN SHTICK?

HM: She had four children by I think four different men. But it didn’t impinge upon her power and position at all. I find it quite hard to get my head around that because I’m so used to British history and women being treated very differently from men: men being allowed lovers and mistresses, but if a woman has a lover she gets executed.

Dame Helen Mirren and Jason Clarke attend the premiere screening of new Sky Atlantic drama Catherine the Great at The Curzon Mayfair on September 25, 2019 in London, England.

WHERE WAS IT SHOT? THE PALACES LOOK AMAZING.

HM: We shot a lot of it in Russia, in St. Petersburg. Catherine’s palace [is] actually Catherine I’s palace, incredibly renovated by the Bolsheviks, interestingly.

YOU GREW UP IN ESSEX BUT YOU HAVE RUSSIAN ROOTS. YOUR GRANDFATHER WAS AN OFFICER IN THE IMPERIAL RUSSIAN ARMY AND YOU SPEAK IN YOUR MEMOIR ABOUT FINDING A TRUNK OF HIS?

HM: Yes, it was actually his old military trunk that I guess he went on campaigns with. It was very battered, covered in paint splodges. My father used it to paint pots on.

Helen Mirren arrives at the 91st Annual Academy Awards at Hollywood and Highland on February 24, 2019 in Hollywood, California.

But inside were a lot of letters from my grandfather’s sisters. He left six sisters behind in Russia, and so there are all these letters written in a very fine Russian script. When I did Prime Suspect, one of the actors was Russian speaking, and he translated them for me. That was an amazing moment of discovery, opening a door onto the past of my family… [Our name was originally] Mironoff. We did change it eventually – knocked the ‘off’ off the end [laughs]. A lot of people think I’m Scottish because of St Mirren’s. The first time I went to Russia [was] in the late sixties with the Royal Shakespeare Company, one of the very early artistic cultural exchanges. My father said to me that I [should] not tell them that I was of Russian ethnicity or part-Russian or try and get in touch with anyone.

BECAUSE IT WOULD HAVE BEEN TOO DANGEROUS FOR YOUR FAMILY?

HM: Yes, I suspect.

YOUR GRANDFATHER BECAME A TAXI DRIVER, RIGHT?

HM: Yes, and my father. To this day, it’s the one thing that immigrant people can do, even if they have very bad English.

IT WAS YOUR ENGLISH TEACHER IN SCHOOL WHO SUGGESTED YOU JOIN THE NATIONAL YOUTH THEATRE?

HM: I didn’t know that the Youth Theatre existed. She perceived my interest in drama and literature. She said, “You know, there’s this organisation called the Youth Theatre and maybe we should apply for it.” And I did.

Stars of the Royal Shakespeare Company, actor Eric Porter and actress Helen Mirren, at London Airport, London, 1969.

TOWARDS THE END OF YOUR TIME THERE YOU PLAYED CLEOPATRA, WHICH WAS A REAL BREAKTHROUGH, BECAUSE THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY SAW YOU AND YOU WERE OFFERED A JOB?

HM: They had heard of me because [in those days] the Youth Theatre got reviews in the national papers. Antony and Cleopatra had been reviewed, so I think the RSC had alerted themselves to my existence.

THEN YOU STARTED GETTING YOUR FIRST TELEVISION ROLES. HOW DIFFICULT WAS IT ADAPTING TO SCREEN WORK AFTER BEING TRAINED ON THE STAGE?

HM: For a long, long time I thought I was awful. I always called it “rabbit in the headlights” acting. It’s much easier for kids now because they all film themselves. They are used to being filmed, [but] a camera was a terrifying thing to me, and it took me an awfully long time to get used to it. The thing that taught me how to work on film, wasn’t working on film. It wasn’t until Prime Suspect, when I was working all day, every day, week after week after week, that I really came to understand what the dolly does, how important continuity is, how important hitting your mark is and all of those very, very important technical parts of filming.

English actor Helen Mirren pictured at a press launch for the new series of the Granada Television police series Prime Suspect at the Ritz Hotel in London in January 1995. Helen Mirren plays the role of Jane Tennison in the series.

DID YOU HAVE A CLEAR IDEA OF WHERE YOU WANTED TO GO WITH YOUR CAREER WHEN YOU WERE STARTING OUT?

HM: No, I just did work that interested me and hoped for the best.

Dame Helen Mirren takes her curtain call as Queen Elizabeth at The Opening Night of The Audience on Broadway at The Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on March 8, 2015 in New York City.

PRIME SUSPECT WAS REALLY THE FIRST BIG FEMALE DETECTIVE ROLE, AND IT WAS ALSO AN ALL-FEMALE TEAM OF WRITER AND PRODUCER, WASN’T IT?

HM: It wouldn’t have happened without Linda [La Plante]. Linda was really an extraordinary writer and she believed in the power of women. She believed there weren’t enough roles for women and her work broke that. It was [one of] the first scripts I’d ever read, except maybe Cousin Bette, which was actually my very first TV role, I think, where the women actually drive the story.

YOU CUT YOUR HAIR SHORT FOR THAT ROLE AS WELL?

HM: The short hair was very important because if you have long hair you can be grabbed by the hair. If policewomen have long hair, they usually have it tied back. And they never fold their arms because folding your arms is a defensive thing to do – that was what a policewoman told me.

WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO HAVE THE SAME CHARACTER TO DEVELOP OVER SO MANY YEARS?

HM: That was extraordinary. Linda wrote the first two [episodes] and then we had different writers for the rest. I got into a position where I could have a voice in the writers and the directors. And I always wanted the writers to be absolutely free to tell whatever story they wanted, and because of that I think the quality of the writing was very, very good in general. We [also] had some great directors. Philip Martin did one, who I just did Catherine with, Tom Hooper did one.

AND TOM HOOPER WENT ON TO DIRECT YOU IN ELIZABETH I?

HM: Yes, he is a top film director now.

IN 2005 YOU STARRED IN A TWO-PART MINI-SERIES ABOUT ELIZABETH I. QUITE A LOT OF THE SCRIPT WAS HER WORDS, WASN’T IT?

HM: It was and that was the brilliance of Nigel Williams, who wrote the script. It was such a difficult thing to do, to make dialogue between characters believable and understandable … but at the same time be able to weave in authentic and original Elizabethan dialogue, which Nigel did. It was a brilliant, brilliant piece of work. And he wrote Catherine, so I was very happy to work with him again.

STARTING OUT, WHAT WAS YOUR BIGGEST CHALLENGE IN THIS INDUSTRY AS A WOMAN? AND HOW DID YOU OVERCOME THAT OVER TIME?

HM: My biggest challenge as a woman starting out was obviously the paucity of roles – and still is. Well, it’s changed enormously. I’m very jealous of young actors coming into this world now because – the women in particular – it’s so much better than it was. But it’s still kind of not very fair. Next time you watch television or go to the cinema, just count the number of men on the screen and then count the number of women you see. I used to sit with a piece of paper watching television with a pencil and every time I saw a man, didn’t matter what he was doing, I’d just put a mark – man, man, man, man, woman, man, man, man… [laughs]. We’re 50 percent of the population, why do I have to watch drama where I’m not represented? Old, young, middleaged, whatever – why aren’t we there? So, thank god, times have changed, but they haven’t gone far enough in my mind. Not yet.

FINALLY, WHAT’S THE ONE THING YOU WOULD TELL YOURSELF AS A 21-YEAROLD ACTRESS?

HM: Just be open; be open to experience. My advice to any [young] actor is be on time. This is the weird contradiction of being an actor. You have to have ego, you have to have a certain kind of self-confidence, but at the same time that can lead you into being an idiot. So, you have to calibrate that: somehow have confidence, have courage, go where others fear to tread, be bold, be brave, be beautiful in your soul – and be on time [laughs].

Helen Mirren accepts Best Actress in a Leading Role award for The Queen at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, California on February 25, 2007